Books

If you are using MacOS, Java is built-in. If you are using Linux, make sure to use either the Sun JDK or OpenJDK (and not gcj, which is the default Java command on many Linux distros). If you are using Windows, just download and install the latest JDK package.

Note, Java 7 pre update 9 on MacOS has a bug that causes problems with futures and iteratees, including making large file uploads hang. If using Java 7 on MacOS, make sure you are using the latest version.

Be sure to have the java and javac commands in the current path (you can check this by typing java -version and javac -version at the shell prompt).

Play can be installed using Typesafe Activator. The documentation on this page is about installing the Play standalone distribution. If you would like to use Typesafe Activator, then follow the instructions here to install Play.

Download the latest Play standalone distribution and extract the archive to a location where you have both read and write access. (Running play writes some files to directories within the archive, so don’t install to /opt, /usr/local or anywhere else you’d need special permission to write to.)